Thinking About China
Opinion

Beijing’s New Five-Year Plan: More of the Same

China’s recently announced five-year plan contains mostly what Xi Jinping has emphasized for some time now.
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Beijing’s New Five-Year Plan: More of the Same
A delegate attends a plenary session of China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 9, 2026. Vincent Thian/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Milton Ezrati
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Commentary

For China’s Communist Party, each new five-year plan is supposed to revise the direction of the economy. The recently announced version—the 15th of its kind—claims to have done that. Of course, like all past plans, it is mostly aspirational, certainly not operational. It states where Beijing wants to take the economy, not how it intends to get it there.

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Milton Ezrati
Milton Ezrati
Author
Milton Ezrati is a contributing editor at The National Interest, an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Human Capital at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and chief economist for Vested, a New York-based communications firm. Before joining Vested, he served as chief market strategist and economist for Lord, Abbett & Co. He also writes frequently for City Journal and blogs regularly for Forbes. His latest book is “Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live.”